_apsis_ without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal
youth of the beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen
from it that I would replace.

The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote, may
be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes in the
lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast quantities,
and the process of making them is one of the things that strangers feel
they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors are no longer made,
and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well as in the beauty of the
thousand curious forms it took. The test of the old glass, which is now
imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness. I suppose the charming
notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of such fineness that it
burst into fragments if poison were poured into it, must be fabulous. And
yet it would have been an excellent thing in the good old toxicological
days of Italy; and people of noble family would have found a sensitive
goblet of this sort as sovereign against the arts of venomers as an
exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of Murano has dwindled from thirty
to five thousand in population. It is intersected by a system of canals
like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of its own, of as stately breadth as
that of the capital. The finer houses are built on this canal; but the
beautiful palaces, once occupied in _villeggiatura_ by the noble
Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of poor, or converted into glass-
works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other literati made the island their
retreat, and beautified it with gardens and fountains. Casa Priuli in that
day was, according to Venetian ideas, "a terrestrial Paradise," and a
proper haunt of "nymphs and demi-gods." But the wealth, the learning, and
the elegance of former times, which planted "groves of Academe" at Murano,
have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes,
or turned into honest cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary